


The Tower

by sigo



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Armitage Hux Has Issues, Armitage Hux is Not Nice, Blood, Blood and Injury, Blow Jobs, Bottom Kylo Ren, Brendol Hux's A+ Parenting, Cadet Hux needed a hug, Crash Landing, Kylo Ren is Not Nice, M/M, Mentioned Brendol Hux, Porn With Plot, Protective Kylo Ren, Scars, The injuries and scars are not fetishized unless you want to, Top Armitage Hux, planetside
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-07
Updated: 2020-05-07
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:00:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24064723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sigo/pseuds/sigo
Summary: Hux felt more than heard Ren kneel next to his body. A gloved hand came down next to his face and then Ren came into view, face bare, a blank void of information suddenly filled.Hux had fully expected a monster, but now he saw the real reason for the mask. No one would fear this Ren. He looked like a lost Prince of Alderaan. These thoughts passed through his mind, and a moment later he knew Ren had read them there, because that damned mouth quirked up and his eyes filled with amusement.“You’re not bad looking yourself,” he said.“Get out of my head you kriffing fool,” Hux hissed back at him.
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Armitage Hux/Kylo Ren
Comments: 19
Kudos: 174





	The Tower

_The Tower, XVI. A bolt strikes the core, breaks the Tower to its foundation. The previous is severed. But the ruin is not an end, for out of violence and rage the next life begins._

It had been a month since high command at D’Qar had heard from one of its ships, orbiting a planet further out on the Rim, and everyone knew in their hearts it had been destroyed. There were reports of heavy First Order activity in the area. And then, this week, the last video logs sent from the ship had been unencrypted. Leia Organa had not been included in the initial viewing, and now the entire base was being summoned to the square to stand and watch it displayed holographically in the night air.

Leia had argued against this but was met with no reply. She did not believe that the entire base needed to witness the carnage that was inevitably recorded in the feed, and she herself was personally apprehensive about its content. She did not always find herself on the good sides of the admirals and generals that made up high command, but they had never shut her out completely before. She made her way to the square, standing at the back next to Poe. The video feed began, hovering and shimmering twenty feet tall in the air, and the crowd hushed.

They looked down on the main control center of the little ship at an angle, viewing it through the security cam. The picture was glitchy and the sound went in and out abrasively, hissing static and then leaving them with only the night sounds of the jungle, and returning at odd intervals. They watched their comrades huddle together, weapons trained on the door beneath the camera.

Suddenly the durasteel door flew inward, and at the same instant each blaster in the arms of the resistance exploded, injuring or killing the soldiers that held them. There were cries of dismay from the crowd and Leia thinned her lips. Of course they had known, they always knew, that their friends and family aboard that ship were dead. But it was one thing to know it and another to see it. Leia felt cold creep up her spine as her suspicions grew as to why she’d been locked out of the first viewing and why no one had taken her input on a mass viewing of this feed. Because what else could explode those weapons, besides Kylo Ren? But no one knew it was Ben. No one besides her and Han. Did they?

Kylo Ren entered the picture, masked and flanked by stormtroopers as he always was, and reached out to the dying Resistance members, pulling the ones that still lived forward and up onto their knees.

There were gasps in the crowd as the unmistakable form of General Hux, with his bright red hair, entered the room behind Kylo Ren. The rest of the base was realizing what Leia and the high command had already known: that this particular ship knew the location of their base. The assembled people watched the screen raptly, trying to decipher whether or not they would need to pull up their roots and evacuate again.

The sound went in and out, only affording them clipped syllables of the General’s grating voice as he questioned their comrades. One of them spat something unintelligible at him and he grabbed her face in his black-gloved hand, motioning with his other to the troopers. One of them handed over their blaster, and Hux shot the girl point blank.

There was a scream from somewhere in the crowd, far from Leia. The murdered woman had a sister, she remembered. This was a very bad idea, this viewing. It would only kill morale, not stoke it. She silently cursed the imbeciles who had made this call.

There was a flurry of activity on the screen then. The soldier on the far-end of the lineup pulled something from their back and leveled it at Hux. A bowcaster of sorts — ancient in design, holding no plasma charge, likely a weapon from that soldier’s home planet. It was only a metal device shooting metal quarrels, no components to have exploded when Kylo Ren had entered. The man aimed and pulled the trigger in a fraction of a second, and the steel rod hit its mark.

General Hux fell back, the bolt buried deep in his neck, the other side of it jutting out, glistening. Red dripped from his mouth as he tried to breathe around the metal and the blood flooding his throat. Scattered weak cheers came from the assembly, but all gazed up at the hologram in dread. The sight of the First Order’s shrieking propaganda machine rendered mute and dying couldn’t soothe the carnage that was about to arrive as a result of it. And arrive it did. The man on the far left, the one who had shot, was abruptly wrenched apart. His death splattered his comrades with gore, seconds before they were rendered in red by the glow of Kylo Ren’s ignited lightsaber. He made short work of them, and the only balm was that the First Order had not had time to torture the location of the Resistance Base from the deceased rebels now slouched in the corners of the frame.

When every soul not allied with the First Order had been extinguished from the ship, Kylo Ren turned back to the prone body of the General. He powered down his saber and dropped it to the floor, and then reached up and removed his helmet.

Leia’s heart jumped when the face of her son came into view. He was older, twice as old and he’d been when he was taken and by then she hadn’t seen him in two years. He was a man now, but there were traces of the boy he’d been in the set of his jaw and in his wide, dark eyes, and those traces cut her deeply.

There were murmurs starting in the crowd, people who, like her, recognized this evil man for the boy he’d been. Poe tugged at her arm, saying words she couldn’t hear but could guess the meaning of, and she shook her head at him, taking his hand. She needed to see this, to see every second of her son’s face that she could.

Kylo Ren — Ben, it was Ben’s face above that familiar, hated armor, and Leia forced herself to think of him as Ren instead — fell to his knees beside the General and lifted the man’s torso fully into his lap, cradling it close. Hux had not yet died, Leia was startled to see, as he lifted one glove, slick where he’d pawed at his injury, and his hand twitched minutely. His eyes were closed, shifting rapidly beneath his eyelids. Leia saw, with no small measure of alarm, that her son was crying over the hideous man. The General was unable to say anything but, grotesquely, tried to and spit up more blood. The broken audio cut in and out, submerging them in the sounds of his choking and then in silence, and then back into overwhelming sound.

Ren, with shaking hands, grasped the quarrel at the pointed, hooked end and pulled it through, throwing it away. It left a series of red marks on the floor as it clattered toward the wall. Blood poured from the holes at each side of the General’s neck. Ren covered them with gloved hands, the blood gushing around his fingers, and closed his eyes as well.

Long moments passed. They made a sickening tableau together, rendered in black and white and red. The General’s chest heaved as he choked, his dying breaths spraying a fine red mist up over Ren’s face. And then his breaths slowed, but they didn’t stop. Impossibly, they were evening out.

Ren pulled his hands away, wiping at the sides of Hux’s neck, wiping away blood from healed flesh. A wave of alarm went through the crowd as they watched the face of the First Order come back from the brink of death. General Hux spat up one more round of bloody saliva, his eyes cracking open and then shut again and his head falling back. Unconscious but alive. Ren wiped at his face, pulling away strings of red-tinged spit, a fool’s errand. There was too much blood to wipe away. But Ren was smiling, and there was so much Ben in that smile that Leia felt a tear slide down her own cheek. Once it appeared that General Hux had recovered from his ordeal and was breathing, breathing deeply, Ren pulled him close and kissed him on the forehead, a sickeningly possessive gesture. Poe’s hand gave Leia’s a squeeze, and she realized she was crushing his own in her grip. She loosened it.

Ren pulled away and was speaking excitedly, perhaps to the unconscious body of the General, or to the troopers, or to no one in particular, as he had done when he was small. Some of his words came through the patchy audio, the timber of his voice — deeper, grown, but achingly familiar and human without the vocoder in his helmet — Leia knew she could not forget it.

“—ux...I did—more powerful than grandfather...” He turned then, excitement fading back into a severe expression, barking something at his troopers, who began to rifle through the station, tearing it apart. Ren’s hands stayed on Hux, holding him close, one hand coming up to rub at the drying blood on his neck, trying to clean it enough to see the scar.

Leia felt sick, tried to maintain distance and could not, her mind roiling. Had her son been...been given to this hateful man? Her mind’s eye pictured Ben as she had last known him, thirteen and gangly and sad, being ushered forward to meet the General. But of course that had never happened. Ben was nearly of an age with Hux, who had been no General when Ben was taken. She tried to de-age Hux in her mind and the picture dissolved. Surely, however, even as a child the man had been crueler than Ben, sharper than Ben, more than a match for an isolated and lonely boy afraid of himself.

And now neither were children, and both were dangerous. The two most dangerous men in the galaxy. “Let’s go, now,” she told Poe, but they had scarcely moved with the picture changed again, the whole ship rocking in the frame of the video. Just before the feed cut out, it was apparent that one of the troopers, in ransacking the ship, had triggered the rebel crew’s last-resort detonations accidentally, and the whole affair would be going down. High command viewed this as a victory, she knew. For who could survive a crash like that? Leia returned to her room, Poe walking with her, hardly feeling a step she took on her way there.

In the mess the video feed had made of her mind, still she knew one thing: whatever her son had become, it remained alive. She hadn’t yet felt him die.

  
  


The first thing that drifted through the dark was noise — something constant, crackling. Fire. Yes, there was bitter smoke in the air. The second thing was pain. He ached. General Hux of the First Order opened his eyes and saw gray sky clouded with acrid black smoke. Planetside, then. Which was Not Good. They should be in space. Had been in space. Hux slowly drew himself up to standing, coughing roughly and nearly losing his balance on the soft earth. He was unused to it, felt that he might sink into it compared to the hard durasteel floors he preferred. “Status report,” he called roughly, wiping at the fresh trickle of blood sliding down his face with one leather glove. He tapped at the edges of the wound — superficial. He was covered in tacky dried blood, though. It rendered most of his face and the chest of his uniform sticky. His memories were vague, still being pieced back together. Something had happened...something had caught him off guard....

A trooper answered him at last, voice filtered through their helmet. “Resistance shuttle and both of our ships down, sir. FN-8278 and SR-4293 stable. Rest of unit unresponsive. Lord Kylo Ren stable.”

Hux’s chest clenched. Ren. He looked up and there the man was, hulking in his robes and helmet, completely unharmed while the remains of three transports burned up around them. Resistance ship...he’d been interrogating prisoners, and then….

“You insolent child,” Hux seethed, stalking toward Kylo Ren and thumping him hard on the chest with his fist. The two troopers rifling through the burning wreckage around them froze in horror, which only heightened Hux’s rage.

With their ships downed on this watery shithole of a planet thanks to the bloody fucking Resistance, they’d lost an entire unit of troopers. Hux put it all down to Ren’s reckless whims — his search of the Outer Rim for Jedi artifacts had resulted in their presence in this sector to detect that rebel ship in the first place. This would not stand. Ever since the day the Knight had been assigned to co-command the Finalizer he’d been a vibroblade in Hux’s side.

“You will not throw my men’s lives away. They are exceptionally trained soldiers, not droids for you to—“ Hux choked, body flying backwards and smacking hard into a piece of debris before toppling to the ground.

“I saved your life, General. You should thank me,” Ren intoned, voice stripped of any cadence by his mask’s vocoder. He turned and barked at the troopers, “Leave us. Search the other wreck for survivors.”

Hux fumed silently as the troopers rushed to obey. He lifted his head to meet Ren’s invisible gaze, hair falling in his face and lip split painfully. He tasted blood. Hux schooled his features into mild disdain as best he could despite the mess. He started to lift himself up on his arms and found himself knocked flat again. This time he stayed down, the side of his face pressed against the damp green earth.

Ren came to stand beside him.

The clasps of his helmet hissed and it was dropped unceremoniously beside Hux, making him jump. It rolled away.

“I feel how my mask makes you uneasy. I’ve heard your thoughts, wondering what sort of monster hides beneath it.” Ren’s voice was low and impossibly rich without his vocoder.

“You don’t scare me,” Hux said quietly, although he shivered at the electricity that ran through the air around the Knight. He tasted ozone.

“No,” Ren said, considering, “I don’t. I intrigue you and I infuriate you, which is much more interesting. There were no more survivors. I sent your troopers away because I want this moment to be between us, General. You missed it before.”

Hux felt more than heard Ren kneel next to his body. A gloved hand came down next to his face and then Ren came into view, face bare, a blank void of information suddenly filled.

His hair was a tangle of dark waves. Under the atmosphere of a planet it was dark brown. The artificial lights of a star destroyer would render it inky. His eyes were large and expressive, rich brown ringed with gold. His skin was pale and dotted with black moles like a reverse of the starry view from the bridge of the Finalizer, and currently covered with a thin film of dried blood, same as Hux was. His nose was large and crooked in a regal way, and his mouth was obscene — lips full and pink. A different shiver wound its way through Hux at the sight of that mouth. Hux had fully expected a monster, but now he saw the real reason for the mask. No one would fear this Ren. He looked like a lost Prince of Alderaan. These thoughts passed through his mind, and a moment later he knew Ren had read them there, because that damned mouth quirked up and his eyes filled with amusement.

“You’re not bad looking yourself,” he said.

“Get out of my head you kriffing fool,” Hux hissed back at him.

“I’m sorry about your men,” Ren said, and he actually sounded contrite.

“You aren’t. What do you want?” Hux asked. He tried to sit up and found himself pushed down again. “Let me go.”

“Not yet,” Ren said gently. His gloved hand cupped Hux’s face. “Let me check you for injuries.”

An invisible caress wound its way down Hux’s spine beneath his uniform, prodding gently. His skin prickled and his hair stood up all over. The phantom touches pulled away and Ren nodded to himself, satisfied. “Shallow cuts. The troopers are coming back with a medkit. We’ll apply bacta and they should heal right up.”

Hux sat up at last, shifting to sit cross legged beside Ren’s kneeling form. “Did the shuttle’s comms unit survive?” He asked, knowing the answer moments before Ren voiced it just by looking at the man’s guileless face. He decided that unmasked Ren was preferable on all counts.

“No. We’ll need to commandeer one. This planet is inhabited, although I’m not familiar with it. I don’t know where the inhabitants’ loyalties lie.”

Hux snorted. “Fantastic. You couldn’t even use your precious Force to protect our only means of communication with the fleet? What are you worth if you can’t prevent a metal box from being crushed?”

Ren’s face clouded in anger, but he remained silent. The troopers returned with the medkit, as Ren had said they would, along with a bag containing two bottles of water and some ration bars. Hux swabbed his face down, wiping at every swathe of his skin above the collar of his uniform. Ren’s eyes were glued to him as he did so, and Hux resisted the urge to snap at him again. He patted a thin film of bacta over his wounds, and then checked his blaster. It was undamaged, and primed to fire just as it should. He re-holstered it, and their tiny group moved out.

It began to rain as they made their way into the dense boreal forest, and then to pour. Thunder rumbled overhead. The tightly packed foliage kept the rain from truly beating down on them, but the needle-leaves of the trees on this planet didn’t hold on to the droplets very long. All of them were soaked to the bone within the hour. Even their boots were compromised, as the wide roots of the trees crossed each other and deep pools formed between them. Most were only two feet deep — enough to slosh over the sides of their boots. Some were deeper. Once, SR-4293 stepped into one and immediately squealed as the water came up to her chest. She splashed herself in the face as she thrashed in fear. She and FN had each discarded their helmets as water had run into them and filled the panels of transparisteel that served as visors, rendering them useless. Hux made a mental note to submerge a trooper helmet when he got back to the Finalizer and identify the flaw responsible. Ren had stood on a root and lifted SR out of the pool with the Force, setting her down gently. She was young, with dark eyes, straight black hair, and deep olive skin. The green light filtering down through the canopy didn’t blanch her features as badly as Hux, Ren, and FN. The blond trooper was currently scouting ahead.

“Thank you, sir!” SR told Ren brightly. Both of the troopers were braver with him unmasked, and Hux was as proud of them as he was annoyed.

Hux carefully picked his way around the pool she’d fallen in, sticking to the roots at its edge. “It’s hard to tell the depth,” he murmured, “with the rain coming down. It mars the surface.” He raised his voice to make sure Ren heard the next part, “We’re going downhill. It might be flooded up ahead. You’re certain there are inhabitants this way?”

Ren nodded, “I can feel their force signatures. They’re distant, but...this way. I hope we don’t hit a lake. It’d take a while to skirt it.”

Hux was still searching for an appropriate retort when a thunderous roar echoed through the trees. In the next instant FN was torn asunder, white armor cracking open and red spilling out, splattering the nearby trees and the roots at his feet. The creature responsible paused only a moment, long enough for Hux to register it: black eyes locked on him, brown fur, black claws jutting out of huge feet, and fearsome teeth stained with gore and bared in a snarl. Then it charged.

Hux turned and ran, blood pulsing at his temples, breath already ragged in the humid air. SR was on his left, beside him and then in front of him, her trooper boots providing her better traction on the slick roots and dirt that made up the forest floor. Ren gained on his right side and surpassed him as well.. The creature’s heavy footfalls were just behind him, its low growl rattling the vertebrae at the base of his skull, and then he was knocked flat forward directly into a pool he’d been about to jump.

When he surfaced he registered three things. One, his back was on fire from his neck all the way down his thighs. Two, SR had been attacked as well, her armor crumpled in on her form sickeningly. Three, that left Ren for the beast to pursue.

The Knight was backed up a tree, saber ignited but slouched to one side, dominant hand pressed into a wound on his ribs. He slashed at the creature, unable to land a fatal blow from the distance he kept to avoid its claws. Hux drew his blaster, aimed, and shot. The beast screamed in pain, turned to charge back at Hux. His second shot caught it between the eyes. This accomplished, his energy flagged. Against his will Hux sank back into the pool.

When he woke he saw the ground, swaying disconcertingly below him. It was no longer moss and roots, but the pebbled ground leading toward a mountain range. The light was nearly gone from the day as well. Hux blinked a few times before realizing that the swaying of the ground was due to Ren. He was being carried on the Knight’s back.

Ren’s left hand gripped Hux’s thigh. His right was cradled by an invisible hand. Ren’s saber wasn’t ignited, but he carried it ready.

“Ren,” He croaked.

“There’s an overhang just ahead,” Ren said. “We’ll camp there and I’ll tend to your injuries better. I put bacta on them hours ago. You must have broken some kind of record for almost dying within the same standard twenty-four hours. It’s a record for _me_. I’ve never saved the same man’s life more than once.” True to Ren’s word, he deposited Hux on the ground twenty paces later, under a rocky outcropping that shielded them from the ongoing drizzle. “Can you move your arms?” Ren asked.

Hux tested his limbs in ascending order: fingers, toes, wrists, ankles, elbows, knees, shoulders — and here was the pain, knife-sharp when he moved his shoulders or hips, his entire back on fire. He groaned, nearly falling over, and then ground out, “It got me badly, I think. SR was dead?”

Ren grunted, rummaging through their bag. “Dying. I put her out of her misery. I salvaged the supply bag. I need to look at your back without that coat on. Can you get it off yourself?”

Hux attempted it and cried out. Ren hurried over to help, tugging the coat free of his shoulders and down his arms. Hux grunted when Ren pulled the fabric free of his wounds which had clotted around it.

“Gonna need the uniform off too,” Ren murmured. “Here, roll over,” he pushed Hux onto his stomach to gauge the damage.

“Gravel in the face is a nice touch,” Hux said, and Ren pushed his folded coat under his head wordlessly. The Knight reached around to unzip Hux’s uniform and pulled that free as well, hissing audibly as the deep scratches down Hux’s back were revealed. “Okay,” Ren said, as though he were looking at a filthy room he was tasked with cleaning. Then, “Need your pants off, they go down your left leg.” He said.

“Absolutely not,” Hux said automatically.

“You want to die of an infection before we get off this planet? An infected scratch on your ass?” Ren intoned at him, already tugging at his waistband.

Hux flipped over and grabbed Ren’s wrists, fighting him. The wounds on his back cracked open and the pebbles on the ground dug into his injured thigh painfully.

“Hux what the hell—“ Ren yelled, and then Hux was pinned down with his arms painfully above his head, held there by the Force. Ren angrily huffed at him and then made quick work of his trousers, peeling them down his hips and thighs. “Don’t know what you were shy about,” Ren murmured, voice taking on a humiliating lecherous edge. “Okay, turn back over so I can treat you.”

“I’ll do it myself.”

“You can hardly move. Stop being difficult.”

“You’re the difficult one.”

Ren proceeded to turn Hux over himself, black-gloved hands large and rough on his sides. “Didn’t you grow up in a barracks? I don’t get—“ Ren fell silent, one of his hands moving down to brush against the dimples of his back, the very top of where the ropes of scars began.

Hux knew exactly what Ren was seeing. He could see the edges that wrapped around his hips even without a mirror, knew that the whole affair had by now aged into a light pink-purple. They would never be white, the fault of his genetics. By the time he’d had control of his own medical care they’d been too entrenched in his skin for any amount of scar tape to lift them.

“Not a word,” Hux said. And then, “Are you going to treat me or not?”

Ren set to work, removing the gravel Hux had writhed on from the scratches running the length of his back and his left thigh, and then spraying the whole ruined area with sanitizer, which burned, wrenching curses from Hux. This complete, Ren wiped away any residual blood and grime with a steri-sheet, and then carefully stuck bacta patches over the wounds. The bacta soothed him enough for Hux to push himself up on his elbows and turn onto his right side.

“There’s no scar tape in here...uh, if you wanted any.” said Ren. “Guess you’re getting some new ones out of this.”

Hux heaved a sigh at him and refused to dignify that with a response. Instead he said, “You were injured too. I saw it. Do you need...” he searched for the appropriate word, “...assistance?”

“Patched myself up. I’m fine.” Ren said, and his dark eyes were still glued to what was visible of Hux’s scarred backside. “What—“

“I said not a word. It’s not a conversation I’m having with you.” Hux shed his gloves, pulled his boxers and trousers up, and then sat up with a scowl to undo his boots. “I refuse to deal with rotting feet in addition to being stuck on an unknown planet,” he said to Ren’s raised eyebrows. And then, his humor returned now that he was semi-clothed again, “So you’re getting to see all of me, Lord Ren. You’re very welcome for the privilege.” He wiggled his white toes at Ren.

Ren snorted at him and pulled off his own boots. “Can’t chance a fire tonight,” he murmured. “We don’t know the fauna here. It could scare the wildlife off but it could also attract it.”

Hux agreed that a fire wouldn’t be worth the danger, as dismal as a cold and pitch-dark night would be. He inspected his greatcoat and found the back ripped in three places, and so resigned himself to losing it by spreading it over the gravel as a sleeping mat.

Ren was divesting himself of his sodden layers as well. He undid his tunic and pulled off the long-sleeved shirt beneath it, throwing it over Hux’s face. “You’ll get cold without a shirt,” he grunted by way of explanation. “And your uniform’s in shreds. Best to leave it behind entirely, I think. We don’t know if this planet is loyal to the Resistance.”

Hux put it on without thanking him. Ren’s shirt was big on him and smelled extremely of Ren’s sweat, but it would do. It was even warm from the man’s body which, Hux noted, was just as bulky without his robes. Hux had always assumed that some of Ren’s build was armor, and felt rather cheated that it wasn’t. Half of his own girth in uniform was careful tailoring. Hux wasn’t out of shape, per se, but he’d always been thin. Ren was sculpted. Hux had never looked like that and never would.

Ren crawled close, settling down on Hux’s coat as well. “Going to argue with me on this too?” He asked, tone biting.

Hux leaned into this challenge. “No. Actually, come closer. You’re like a furnace.”

And Ren was. As soon as he was given permission he fit his body against the uninjured — well, less injured — side of Hux, and he was a nearly-pleasant source of warmth.

They woke with first light, and Hux was unsure if he’d ever felt worse. He had a million aches and pains from sleeping on the ground in addition to his itching, healing injuries beneath their bandages, and while Ren’s body heat had kept him from shivering the night through, his left side was cold. It had also been a long time since he’d last been this grimy, if ever.

Hux shifted, moving without having quite decided whether he was getting up or whether he was turning his left side into Ren’s chest, when he felt something decidedly hard and uncomfortable but also decidedly hot prod against his thigh. And it just figured that Ren had somehow won the galactic lottery on all fronts, didn’t it? The man was powerful and attractive and fit and, apparently, hung, judging by the stiff member currently digging into Hux’s hip.

“Ren,” He said aloud, voice pinched. Ren mumbled something and then shifted, canting his hips forward, seeking friction, and Hux snapped, “ _Ren_.”

Ren woke, staring blearily into Hux's eyes as he came out of whatever dream or void he’d been inhabiting. His breath was stale on Hux’s face. If Hux were being fair, his own breath couldn’t be nice either, but he was not feeling charitable with Ren’s monstrous cock trapped up against him. Ren realized the full state of himself and pulled his hips away. Hux couldn’t prevent his eyes from dipping down to trace the outline of Ren’s erection in his leggings, just to verify it was as big as it felt.

“How long was I out yesterday?” Hux asked, sitting up. He winced and rubbed at his neck again, which seemed to wake Ren up entirely.

“Don’t know, exactly. Hours. I made good time, even with your dea-- your weight.”

“So we’re closer to these inhabitants you say are here?”

“I think we’ll reach them tomorrow night, if you can walk a normal pace. The day after at the latest.” Ren yawned and dug through the bag beside him, pulling out a ration bar and breaking it in half. Hux took the offered half and bit into it, preferring even the taste of grainy chemical vanilla to the taste of his own mouth right now.

While they ate, Hux rubbed at the back of his neck again absently, and then the side, and then ran his fingertips over the raised circular scar he found there. It wasn’t a wound. It seemed almost as long-healed as the ones on his legs. His scattered memories coalesced, and he nearly choked on the bite of the ration bar he’d been swallowing. He leaned forward, swallowed roughly, coughed, and then spoke. His voice was high and reedy, as it tended to be when he was distressed, the sound of it only upsetting him more.

“They _SHOT ME!_ ”

Ren looked at him blankly. “...Yeah.”

“There was a _kriffing arrow in me_ , how--”

“I told you I saved you. Three times, if you’re counting.” Ren told him proudly.

“How?”

“The Dark Side of the Force--”

“Nevermind,” Hux cut him off with a groan. Ren’s face clouded. He obviously wanted to regale Hux with the details of his infuriating wizardry, but there was really only so much general unpleasantry that Hux thought of as a broad category labeled ‘Ren’ -- failed missions, objects destroyed or repaired by unseen hands, dry Jedi theology -- that he could bear in quick succession.

“Even Vader couldn’t heal the ones he loved,” Ren murmured quietly, finishing his own half of the ration bar in a savage bite. “It drove him mad. I’ve surpassed him.”

“In both power and madness, surely. Ready to walk?”

They stuck to the gravel paths near the cliffside as long as they could, to keep dry, but eventually Ren indicated they would have to turn downhill again. They had only walked three miles before they hit a lake, just as Hux had feared they would. Ren wordlessly began picking his way around it and Hux followed, paying close attention to where he stepped so as not to get more water in his boots.

Hux glared out at the rippling surface of the lake, cursing it for existing and deriving at least minimal pleasure from that, when the clouds opened above. The slate-gray surface of the lake was transformed, and Hux stopped as if struck, turning his body completely to look at it. Ren took note ahead of him, turning back and appraising Hux’s changed posture, and then drawing his saber.

“What’s wrong?” Ren asked as he scanned the point where Hux’s eyes were fixed for any sort of creature.

“Nothing,” Hux said quickly, then added, “I’ve never seen that, is all.”

“A lake?” Ren said incredulously, annoyed.

“No,” Hux answered absently, with none of his usual bite. His eyes were still fixed on the rippling surface of the water. On the way it sparkled. “We had more than enough water on my planet,” he said at length. “I haven’t seen sunlight on it.”

Ren had nothing to say to that, and in time they moved on.

The forest changed, needle-trees giving way to larger ones with thick, mossy trunks and wide and wandering branches. They were covered in scattered violet fungi, and tiny colorful insects flitted between them. The bugs didn’t seem to be the biting sort, and Hux silently thanked the stars for small favors. On the far side of the lake they discovered a road, poorly maintained and rendered out of dirt, but a road nonetheless. The huge trees had been groomed long ago to grow their branches in an archway over it. It would lead them to civilization, Ren was sure. He could feel the force signatures of living beings drawing closer and closer.

Their pace was slower than Ren had wanted it to be. The Knight didn’t say so, but he thinned his mouth disapprovingly every time Hux stopped for water, and the resulting stop he took to piss into some low brush.

As the sun started to dip, and Hux paused again to lean against a tree, stretching his shoulders and feeling his healing wounds ache, Ren sighed pointedly.

“Yes, you’d be moving much faster if you’d let me die,” Hux snapped at him, and Ren abandoned any effort to express his impatience, seeming properly chastened for once in his life.

Night came on and they hunkered down again, beneath the looping branches of one of the trees just off the road this time. Ren shed his robes for their sleeping mat. The ground was softer here, but just as cold. There would be no fire again, they both knew, and Hux didn’t utter any protest when Ren put an arm around him, pulling him in close.

His sleep, when it came, was fitful. He dreamed of a tower, the one that had lain on the grounds of Arkanis Academy, the one the students called Area Null. He’d scaled it more than once in his days there, and he did so in his dreams again. His feet were bare, sliding against the winding stone steps in a muted hush as the continual storms raged outside. It was dry enough within the high walls of the tower, but the stairway still smelled of the rain-flood in the stories below. A green smell, low and flat. Hux took the stairs up and up, the stairway twisting around as it rose. He reached the door at the top and laid his hands on the cracked, ancient wood. He pushed it open, walked through into the darkness, and found himself again where he’d begun.

When he woke, after Ren this time and still within the grasp of the dream, he thought, _I’ll have Ren raze the damned thing to the ground_.

They walked along the road for miles, both moving faster today. Hux felt he was on the mend, and Ren’s gait was quickened because he insisted the inhabitants were close by. Just as day turned to evening, an old fuel station loomed ahead of them on the road and they passed it by in silence. It was old, the steel panels of the building rusted and the tech outmoded.

Just a mile further up the road was a little farm, with big white barns and a small house set back from the road. There was an antennae jutting up from one of the barns. Hux and Ren nodded once at each other, and approached.

Hux knocked at the door, three crisp taps with his knuckles. There was motion within. Ren reached over abruptly and pulled Hux’s hair down into his face. Hux took his meaning immediately; better not look the part of the General. Two days of red stubble on his jaw didn’t hurt in that effort. The door swung open, and a couple appeared. Farmers, dressed simply. The couple took in Ren and Hux’s ragged appearance, their faded black clothes with no insignia. The wife spoke first, her face open and worried. “Do you need help?”

Hux suppressed a smile. This would be, perhaps, dismally easy. “Yes,” he said, “Our ship’s gone down. We need to get back to our people. If you would be so kind as to lend us the use of your comms device, my co-pilot and I would deeply appreciate it.”

“Your ship?” The husband said. “The one that’s been orbiting for a while? We saw it happen. You survived _that?_ The attack and the explosions, the crash? Hells!”

His wife’s eyes lit up. “You’re Resistance! Please, come in.” She ushered them in and rushed off, sweeping into a bedroom off of the main room in their little farmhouse, gathering things into the bathroom and smoothing the sheets. She returned and offered them the guest room for the night, and told them that if they had need of anything, they should only ask and it was theirs.

The bathroom had real running water, and Hux nearly melted into it. He tore off the old bacta patches, folding them into the wastebasket, and let hot water wash over his new scars. They were bad -- new enough to be an alarmingly dark purple. But, healed. Hux scrubbed himself clean as efficiently as possible, leaving hot water for Ren more out of self-preservation than charity. He left his hair dripping into his face. Ren was correct in that it was better not to look like a propaganda poster at the moment. The farmer’s wife had left toothpaste tabs and a toothbrush out for them, and Hux was delighted to brush his teeth, doing as thorough job of it as he could.

When he was clean and dressed, Hux inquired as to where the couple kept their communication machine, as he most urgently needed to contact his people. He found the comms device exactly where he had thought it would be, just within the barn. The white structure was filled with the smell of the large mushrooms growing there, a low and earthy smell, vaguely rotten without rotting. Hux activated the machine. It was outdated and large, losing its flaking layer of red paint, but it flared to life immediately. He punched in Phasma’s unit number and requested video transmission, signing the request with his name. She answered immediately.

“Stars, you’re alive,” her blue holographic form said. “Where the hell are you?”

“Sending you the coordinates of this device now,” Hux said, pushing old buttons. “Got it?”

A moment passed, the form of Phasma staring down at the screen of her own comms unit. “Yes, sir.” she said. “We can pick you up in eight standard hours. Are you safe?”

“Never,” Hux grinned at her, “But we’ll make it work. Ren’s with me. No one else survived.”

“Do try not to kill each other before I get there to see it,” Phasma said, and ended the transmission.

Hux re-entered the little house, taking in the wooden furnishings and the farmer’s wife bustling around her kitchen as her husband sat at the table, trying in vain to get a just-showered Ren to say more than a word to him. These were nice people, that much was plain. Hux knew it about them in a distracted, academic way. Nice had no bearing on his life, except that the pretense of it was occasionally useful.

“Allow me,” Hux told the woman as she flitted back and forth between heating her baby’s bottle under the tap and hanging her laundry to dry on a line-rack in the next room. He took the bottle, holding it beneath the stream of warm water for her. She thanked him, eyes shining, and finished pinning up little socks on the line. When she returned, Hux held the bottle out to her and she reached for it. In one graceful motion, Hux drew his blaster and shot her between the eyes. She died with the dreamy smile of gratitude still on her face. The sound of the blaster set her child to screaming from its crib in their living room.

Her husband stood so fast he knocked his chair back, lunging for Hux with an animal cry. Hux dodged the man’s fists and kicked him square in the chest, knocking him to the floor. The man fumbled an electric bolt-shot out of his jumpsuit pocket, the kind used on sparsely populated planets to deal with predators. Hux didn’t bother to raise his gun, not even looking at the man. His eyes were fixed on Ren, who had also stood and walked now in place behind the man. Ren ignited his saber. With one swing he bisected the farmer before the bolt-shot was leveled at Hux.

Hux holstered his blaster, swept his hair back with both hands, and then made his way over to the crib and reached in.

Ren’s voice broke the strange rhythm of crying, raised to be sure Hux heard him. “Don’t kill it.”

Hux straightened up. He cradled the child in one arm against his slim hip, rocking it until it quieted and looked up at him blankly with wide eyes. “I’m not a wasteful man,” he chided Ren. “The trooper program will take this one.” He held up his free hand, letting the child grab at his fingers, a soft smile on his face that didn’t fit the pale gleam in his green eyes. “Move the bodies, will you? Under the table will do. Just to delay word spreading, were a neighbor to look in the window.”

Ren set to work wordlessly, heaving the corpse of the woman into place and closing her eyes, and then hauling the ruins of the man to her side. Hux had rocked the child back to sleep and placed it back in the crib, Ren saw when he was done. Ren almost asked where in the galaxy someone like Hux had even learned to hold a baby, much less comfort one, until he remembered Hux’s penchant for being overly involved with everything he did. And he was _very_ invested in his stormtrooper training program.

“I’m going to bed,” Hux announced, sliding past Ren to return to the guest room. Ren followed.

Hux ran a hand over the sheets. They were better quality than his regulation ones aboard the _Finalizer_ , and he shed every scrap of clothing he wore before laying down on them. He rested on his stomach with his arms folded beneath his head, until he felt Ren’s eyes on him. Ren’s gaze was raking over his backside again, lingering on the scars that slashed their way across his lower back and ass and thighs. Hux turned onto his back. Ren looked away at last, shedding his tunic and crawling into bed next to him in just his leggings.

“If you must know,” Hux said, “My father gave me those scars. He used to whip me when he was especially displeased. Not high enough for it to show over my cadet uniform trousers in a shirts and skins drill. They hardly bother me now, except that it isn’t a flattering tale.”

“Not flattering?” Ren repeated, brows low over his eyes. “You said you were a cadet. How old...fourteen, fifteen? A child. Who would blame a child for being injured?”

Hux had multiple answers, Brendol Hux among the list of names that sprung readily to mind, but instead he said, “Thirteen, though the whipping started before, at home.” At Ren’s look he added, “That’s hardly the worst thing I have to thank my father for.”

“What is the worst?” Ren asked at once, and Hux scowled at him.

They lay for a time in silence, Hux considering Ren with the same look on his face he wore when studying a particularly jumbled report. Finally, Hux relented with a sigh. It wasn’t as though Ren had a single friend in the whole galaxy to tell Hux’s secrets to, or anyone at all in his life who would take his word over Hux’s. Except those shadowy knights, but they hardly counted. Hux didn’t think they were capable of normal speech.

So, he began. “On breaks home from school, my father would have these parties, hosting an assortment of other old Empire relics with their molding gray uniforms covered in meaningless medals. Sometimes groups of people and sometimes only one. Most frequently it was a man named Brooks, fancied himself an admiral still, though the Empire lost the war. They’d gather and drink late into the night as the rains pelted the windows. I slipped away from it all as often as I could. Sometimes it was a reprieve from my father’s attention.”

“Sometimes,” Ren mumbled, face drawn, eyes boring into Hux. He was seeing it, Hux knew. Peeking into Hux’s mind, seeing the cold steel manor on the edge of the sea, hearing the storms rattle the transparisteel window panes as molding people in molding clothes drank and smoked themselves to death without a thought in their brains that would come to fruition. Useless, uninventive, only smart enough to be cruel...and they thought themselves the crux of society.

“Sometimes,” Hux continued, “He’d get the idea to trot me out for them. A plaything of sorts, just as my mother had been for him. That’s how they all saw me. Beneath them. Weak. He’d make me serve them, roll their cigarettes and fetch them things...make their drinks. They’d insult me, paw at me. He allowed it. It was my father’s annual Empire Day party, my second year at the academy. We got time off for Empire Day, a whole week, and we were sent home. All of his guests...they were always nauseating but Empire Day increased their self-importance. Every year they were all puffed up like excited waterfowl.”

Ren chuckled at that, still seeing what Hux was remembering, seeing what Hux was showing him.

“Admiral Brooks had wanted a specific drink, the kind you serve in these thin glass tumblers, and I made it, of course, and brought it to him. The waste of atmo next to him,” Hux turned toward Ren, saying as an aside, “She died the next year, actually. Before I could get to her. Pity. Anyway, the woman next to him stuck her leg out, an accident, she claimed. Tripped me. I dropped the drink. Broke the tumbler. Brooks made some loud comment -- he was already a few drinks in -- about my mother. How you’d think I could serve a drink since father had found her in the kitchen, and so on. And my father was in a worse mood than usual. He always was, when he dragged me out into his gatherings. It’s why he did it. So I started to get up, planning to clean up the mess, my father glaring down at me, and Brooks spoke up again. He said, ‘That’s a waste of liquor, that is.’”

Ren shifted, drawing in closer, seeing the wide, pale face of Admiral Brooks in Hux’s mind. The Knight was holding his breath, Hux noticed, and congratulated himself on his skills. “What happened?” Ren said impatiently.

“Brooks said, ‘That’s a waste of liquor, he should lick it up,’ and the whole assembled company thought that was a capital idea, all of them screeching with laughter. And if I’d set straight to it maybe the night would have ended differently. But I…” Hux broke off, his face morphing into an expression of shame that didn’t suit him. “...I thought, at the time, that surely there was a limit somewhere, that my father would see their treatment of me as a reflection on himself, and would stop it. So I looked at him. It made him so angry, angrier than I’d seen him before. He pushed me down, held my face down in the puddle on the floor. He was shouting, all the usual things, how worthless I was, et cetera. And then Brooks leans in and says, ‘It’s a waste of a glass, too. Real glass is expensive.’ And my father rolled me over on my back, and picked up one of the pieces of the cup. Brooks forced my mouth open for him. Father put the glass in my mouth and he said to chew it, and there was no getting away from it when he said to do something, so I bit down on it enough to crack it audibly. I’d hoped that would be enough. It was, for his guests. They laughed. Brooks let me be. Not enough for Father. He said, ‘Again.’ He made me chew that glass up until I couldn’t hold all the blood in my mouth and had to spit it onto the floor. I was afraid to swallow it, afraid I’d swallow glass.”

Ren was quiet for too long, his form still. Hux studiously gazed up at the ceiling, not meeting the searing look Ren was giving him.

“Anyway,” Hux said, folding his hands over his stomach. “I repaid it in full. I shot Brooks at the first opportunity, and I watched my father dissolve. That was...enough. For me.”

Ren’s voice was soft and terrible, saying the last thing Hux ever wanted to hear him say again. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t say that,” Hux hissed.

“Why?”

“Why waste your breath on lies? They aren’t endearing, I promise you.”

“It’s not a lie, I’m sor--”

“Stop. Just tell me what it is that you want.”

Ren turned toward him, one hand coming up to rest lightly on Hux’s neck, cupping his jaw. His dark eyes shined in the dim light, burning black and bright. They fixed on Hux’s eyes, flitted down to his mouth, and then back up.

“Ah,” said Hux. And then again, “Ah. So that’s what you want.” It wasn’t the first time he’d been propositioned in the course of his career. That had started in the academy as well. Ren’s mouth twitched in distaste and Hux realized he was seeing his thoughts again, his memories of touching and being touched in the bunks at the old school, in offices aboard ships. Images moved to the forefront of his brain unbidden, a strange tugging sensation. The taste of smoke, sharp on his tongue. He had started smoking cigarettes young, and they were one of the few items he could be persuaded to trade sexual favors for with the other cadets.

“That’s not what I want,” Ren said. “Gloved hands in the fresher. That’s not enough. I want… I want you. The parts you don’t give to anyone else.”

“And what could you possibly offer _me?_ Yourself? As if anyone wants to see any more of you than they have to,” Hux said. Ren’s face twisted in anger, and he pulled back as if stung. “What do you think this is, Ren, a fairytale? Queens and Jedi Knights and… and _love?_ ” Hux laughed, and the air in the room fizzled with the force of Ren’s emotions, the taste of ozone rising.

“Forget it,” Ren said through clenched teeth, facing the ceiling again, glaring it down as though he could burn a hole through it with his eyes. Probably he could.

“If only,” Hux sighed. Minutes passed in tense silence, and Hux brought his hand up to rub his fingertips over the scar on the side of his throat. It was becoming a habit, this nervous movement, one he’d do well to break. He wondered idly if Ren regretted expending energy to save his life now that the reward of a satisfactory fuck wasn’t forthcoming.

“No,” Ren murmured, as if Hux had spoken aloud.

“I do hate when you do that,” Hux told him drily.

“You’re loud. It’s like you’re talking to me.” Ren turned toward him again, color rising in his face, his features screwed up in anger. “That’s not why I did it.”

“Oh?”

“No. Not that you’d understand. You never do.”

“You don’t want to fuck me?”

“Hux--”

“Or me to fuck you?”

“Yes. No. Don’t say that.”

“Say what?” Hux shifted, looking Ren full in his face now.

“You can’t...say things like that to me. It’s obscene.”

“I just watched you literally split a man in half, Ren. And not in the fun way.”

Ren ran his hands over his face, taking a deep, shuddering breath in and out. From beneath his hands he said, “I’m never going to forget this, you saying this shit to me. That’s why you can’t say it.”

“If you want to get it out of your system…” Hux reached over, finding Ren’s knee and running his hand up from it, squeezing Ren’s muscled thigh through the fabric covering him.

One of Ren’s hands left his face to clasp Hux’s wrist painfully. His voice sounded waterlogged. Ruined. “I _can’t_.”

“Is this some sort of Force User nonsense? Are you celibate, or--”

“No, I can do what I want except-- _Hux_ ,” Ren’s eyes caught his again, their locked gaze holding them there like a predator and prey, and neither could tell in that moment which was which. “ _I can’t do this halfway_ . There’s no...no ‘getting it out my system.’ I can’t have you, and then _not_ \--” Ren’s voice broke off as he took another heaving breath.

And how many partners had Hux left shattered in his wake before he’d given up on anything that wasn’t a strictly negotiated one-night stand? More than he remembered now. The ones that thought they could change him, the ones that tried to meet his exacting standards and fell short then begged him to stay, the ones that had become a threat to his career in one way or another and had to be put down. They’d all had something in common though. They broke between his teeth like thin sheets of glass.

“I won’t,” Ren breathed.

Hux reflected on that a moment, and couldn’t discount it. Whenever he considered his own death of late it was always shaped like Ren. The man was near indestructible and ripped through everything that stood in his way. Hux would have gotten rid of him by now if that weren’t the case. The animosity between them, now going on five years, was perhaps the most consistent thing in his life other than the Order itself. Ren was outside the Order. And Ren, for all the times they’d rubbed up abrasively against each other, never tried to alter Hux or himself to ease the pain. He simply bore it.

“Oh, what the hell,” Hux huffed, and fluidly hoisted himself up and on top of Ren, straddling him. He leaned down, not having quite decided what he would do, and Ren surged up to meet him, big hands gripping his neck as Ren devoured his mouth, biting his bottom lip and tugging it before licking into him. Hux was very glad they’d both had the opportunity to brush their teeth. He met Ren with the same intensity, and with time the taste of the toothpaste gave way to the taste of Ren. Their breath mingled, each of them inhaling more of the other than of the air in the room, growing lightheaded. If Hux had been tasked with imagining what Ren would kiss like, he’d have landed on something like this, he thought. Provided he’d known for sure the man was human, as he did now. Except he wouldn’t have imagined the scratch of his own and Ren’s stubble. He couldn’t wait to shave again. Ren laughed against him, plucking the thought from his mind.

“How do you want--” Hux murmured between kisses.

“Don’t get ahead of this,” Ren interrupted him, hands running from his neck down his body, mapping out his chest and then venturing to his back, running over the scars new and old, “Want to enjoy you.”

Hux sat up, shifting his weight back to settle on Ren’s lap, grinding slow onto his cock, hard again beneath his leggings. Ren groaned, hands coming to Hux’s hips to hold him there as Ren jerked his own hips up, trying for more friction. “Well, what _I_ want,” Hux said, “Is to fuck you. You aren’t putting this thing in me without real lubricant, and we only have bacta packets.” Ren glanced down, appraising Hux’s own rising erection with more timidity than Hux expected. Hux knew he wasn’t small, but the sight of Ren looking at Hux apprehensively when the thing between the man’s own legs should be classified as a weapon was amusing. Hux snorted at Ren’s newfound meekness, grinding down again. “I’m not new to this. I’ll make it feel good,” he promised. And then, “You _have_ done this before?”

“It’s been a while. I was young.”

“Hm, well. Then I’ll be gentle this once,” said Hux, leaning down to capture Ren’s mouth again, and he kept even this kiss soft and slow, noting the way that Ren relaxed into it and, just as Hux pulled away to place open kisses down Ren’s jaw and throat, he gently sucked on Ren’s lower lip and the man _shivered_. Hux filed that information away.

He worked his way down Ren’s chest and stomach, licking the shadowed dips between planes of muscle until he reached the waistband of Ren’s leggings. “Up,” he said quietly, and Ren shakily obeyed, lifting his hips so Hux could pull the fabric down. Hux backed himself off the bed to pull Ren’s leggings completely off, dipping down to rustle through their bag on the floor and return with two pale pink bacta packets from the med kit. He tossed the packets on the bed beside Ren, and, nudging Ren’s legs apart with his own knee, settled between them.

He supported himself with a hand on Ren’s thigh and leaned down toward the thick curve of Ren’s cock, ghosting his breath over its flushed-purple head, and the bedframe shook with a quick vibration. The trinkets aboard the dresser rattled as well. Every piece of furniture in the room was subject to Ren’s will, a microcosm of the galaxy. “Settle down,” Hux chastised him, and took Ren into his mouth, bobbing down as far as he could manage to slick the shaft with his spit, and then coming back up and hollowing his cheeks, sucking. He looked up at Ren’s face then, aware of the picture he was making of himself.

Ren’s eyes were wide, black in the gloom, his mouth had fallen open, lips kiss-swollen, and his hair was wild as he ran his hands through it, strands of it sticking to his face. Hux broke off to grin at him, and Ren remembered himself, reaching down to muss Hux’s hair instead with a curse, pushing him back down. Every shaking breath and moan issuing forth from Ren’s lips went straight to Hux’s cock, and he groped blindly for a bacta packet while he worked. Once he had one, he pulled off again, tearing it open and drizzling the pink gel onto the fingers of his right hand. “Knees up,” he ordered. “Grab them with your hands.”

Ren obeyed after pulling Hux’s hair down onto his forehead. Hux shook it back out of his face, and drove one of his fingers into Ren to the first knuckle, smiling as Ren hissed at the burn of it.

“You said you’d be gentle,” Ren growled at him.

“Didn’t think you were stupid enough to trust me still, but as always you exceed my expectations,” Hux said, but there was the ghost of a smile on his face, and he pulled back to circle his fingers around the tight muscle. “Relax,” he breathed.

“Remind me how,” Ren said, face reddening. “Think about it.”

Hux called up the memory from his last tryst where he’d allowed his partner inside him, realizing it had been a while for him too. That man had been, unfortunately for his own sake, a disappointment. He’d snapped quickly under Hux’s will afterward. The bittersweet memory seemed to help Ren open up, at least. Hux slid one finger in and then two, fucking them in and out a few times before scissoring them slowly. Ren moaned again, louder this time, and it sounded wrenched from him involuntarily. “Tell me when you’re ready,” Hux murmured, bringing his other hand up to pump Ren’s cock, the dual stimulation making Ren’s thighs and stomach clench. The bedframe jolted again and something fell from the dresser, shattering on the floor.

“Ready,” said Ren, his eyes fluttering as Hux pushed his fingers in deeper than before, all the way in. Hux withdrew them, Ren shuddering, his body clenching reflexively around the sudden absence. Hux grabbed the second bacta packet with his clean hand and tore it with his teeth, drizzling most of the gel over his own aching cock and the dregs of it over Ren’s. He fisted himself in his hand to spread the gel, breathing out hard in relief at the pressure, and then lining himself up.

He looked up at Ren’s face and saw his eyes were screwed shut. “Ren,” he said, gently but firmly. “Look at me.” Ren’s eyes opened, stared through him and then focused.

“What?”

“I want you to look at me while you feel me inside you,” Hux said, and pushed in. He went slow, letting Ren adapt to the intrusion, and inch by inch was accepted. Ren grunted once, but didn’t wince or yelp, and once he was in to the hilt Hux counted it as a victory. “Okay?” he whispered, fighting the urge to just fuck into the tight heat enveloping him with total abandon until he came.

“If you don’t move I’m going to kill you,” Ren groaned, voice cracking. It was dizzying to look in his eyes now. It was an evil that Hux enjoyed, staring his partners down while he took them apart, but looking in Ren’s eyes now he felt just as caught, just as overwhelmed.

Hux leaned forward, supporting himself with a hand on each of Ren’s broad shoulders, and Ren released his grip on his own legs, locking them around Hux’s waist, the skin of his calves brushing strangely over the muted nerves of Hux’s scar tissue. It was not contact he would normally allow, but coming from Ren it was different. Hux’s gaze roamed down Ren’s body, cataloguing all the scars he found there, including the most recent one over his ribs. Ren’s hands found Hux’s hair again -- of course his knack for discovering exactly which things annoyed Hux most extended to the bedroom, as he immediately pulled pieces of it forward in Hux’s face again -- and used it to pull Hux down for another kiss.

As Ren shoved his tongue into Hux’s mouth, Hux pulled out just as slow as he’d entered, moving at a torturous pace until he felt the muscled rim of Ren clenching at his head, and then pushed back in completely, in a fluid stroke this time that made Ren moan loud. Hux kept up that rhythm, shifting the placement of his hands when his arms started to ache. The vibration in the room was growing again, the minute shaking of the bed frame settling into his bones. Hux broke their kiss to breathe.

“More,” Ren asked, a delicious pleading note in his voice. Hux increased his pace, drawing more sounds out of Ren, nearly snarling when Ren tried to bite back on them.

“Let me hear you,” Hux said.

“Touch me and you will,” Ren snapped back at him. Hux shifted, bringing his forearm flat across Ren’s broad chest and resting his weight on it there, his free hand moving down to Ren’s cock, squeezing it from root to tip in time with his thrusts. Hux’s own orgasm was building, the tight fluttery feelings in his groin sparking out, tightening the muscles in his thighs. He worked to bring Ren off before himself, and was so focused on the pattern of his movements that everything else faded away, and he’d have missed the signs of Ren’s impending orgasm entirely if the man hadn’t sobbed out, “ _Hux, Hux look at me_.”

Hux’s eyes found Ren’s and Ren came, shuddering. “Oh, _fuck_ ,” Hux said, pumping Ren through his aftershocks, his fist drenched with the pulses of Ren’s come. “ _Fuck_ , look at you. _Look at you, you’re perfect_.” Hux cursed again as he tipped over the edge, spilling himself inside Ren. The vibrating bed frame, and every other item in the room -- maybe every item on the planet, Hux thought erratically -- split apart along intricate geometric fault lines, the pieces floating up in whirling patterns toward the ceiling, and then falling back down to the floor with a muted clatter. The window had cracked as well, a tiny swirling pattern of triangles and diamonds. The mattress landed then, too, more gently, and Hux could see in Ren’s face that he had been concentrating on it, not letting them tumble down too quickly. The mattress was slightly offset by the remains of its frame beneath it, but not so lopsided as to dump them onto the floor.

Once Hux was spent he pulled out, both of them shuddering. Hux rolled off Ren to lay by his side, taking a deep breath and stretching out his muscles. He felt languid, drawn tight to the point of breaking and now loose and sated. It was perhaps the hardest he’d ever come. He wondered if it was leaking out of Ren, but didn’t bother to sit up and look.

“Not yet,” Ren told him, and his voice had that waterlogged quality to it again. “Would you prefer it to?”

“When we get back,” Hux said, “We are doing this in your quarters. You’re not wrecking mine.”

Ren turned onto his side, pulling Hux into his chest and kissing his neck sloppily, right over the scar on that side of it. His left arm was pinned beneath Hux’s shoulders, and that hand found his ribs, held tight there, thumb rubbing circles over his skin. Hux let himself be smothered, tipping his head up so that Ren could access his throat better, letting his thigh fall against Ren’s, letting Ren rest his other hand, huge, warm, on Hux’s stomach, just over his navel. They settled together, and lay for some time in silence. It was full dark outside. Ren’s breathing slowed, sleep trying to overtake him, but Hux’s mind was bright enough to keep him conscious. Hux was already running through schemes to bite back at the Resistance, shelving his latest plans to kill Ren for the time being, replacing them with Ren-centric plans of an entirely different sort.

After a while, Hux spoke, murmuring into the dark between them, his voice taking on the hollow quality of the orator. “And so all will end, all will die, victims of love rather than hate, for love’s ever been the more destructive weapon.”

“What’s that from?” Ren asked, sounding either half-asleep or well-fucked. Likely both.

“Oh, something old. I don’t remember. It was in a paper book, if you can believe it. The academy had a collection of them.”

“Death, then. Is that what this was?”

“Not yet. Not for us, Ren,” Hux said. “We go on.”

**Author's Note:**

> The thing Hux is paraphrasing from at the end is The Dark Tower series by Stephen King, so I guess cadet Hux was a horror novel fan. The line at the beginning and the title are inspired by the Tower card in tarot. Brooks interaction based on the General Hux comic, Brooks character taken directly from comic. Not beta'd, mistakes are mine. Obviously these two assholes having feelings and nuanced lives doesn't make them nice, Hux is still a bitchass war criminal committing c r i m e s and sadboi Kylo Ren is still just cleaving people with a lightsaber left and right. They truly deserve each other.
> 
> [Kylux Spotify Playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6YRMYaT5fte0cPWH5UVGW5?si=J3LTK6tkRyqlKb_taM7eHg)


End file.
